NEW YORK CITY

Lawsuits over adulterated heating oil get a new life.

Self-protection and self-expression can co-exist on your building’s social media platforms. Here’s how.

The frenzy to come up with a name that lends a certain je ne sais quoi – and, just maybe, enhanced value – to New York City apartment buildings has been known to go to comical lengths.

People exhibit inexhaustible imaginative powers when it comes to coining a name that will drape a building with the perfect aura. There are buildings that yearn to sound like money (Trump Tower, The Sterling). There are buildings named for socks (Argyle House), for country clubs (The Pinehurst, Congressional), for English authors (Byron, Boswell, Carlyle), and for schools (Amherst, Barnard, Cambridge). There are buildings that sound like places fox hunters might live (Hardenbrook House, Hadley Arms). And buildings that conjure airy and vaguely European dreamscapes (Azure, Cielo, Beau Rivage).

Until now, to the best of our knowledge, no building in the city had ever been named after an international terrorist organization. But that became the unfortunate fate of Isis, a 19-story condo at 303 E. 77th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was completed in 2010 and named after the Egyptian goddess of fertility.

But with the recent rise of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), the condo’s board of managers realized they had a branding problem. And so, according to a former board member who was not involved in the vote, the Isis board recently voted to scrap the Egyptian goddess name with the terrorist associations and instead go with the less evocative but far safer 303 E. 77th Street.

It could have been worse. The Isis could have been known as the Bin Laden.

Attorney Jim Glatthaar, a partner at Bleakley Platt & Schmidt, remembers it well. “The sponsor was away on vacation and had forgotten to vote and we needed his shares for a quorum,” Glatthaar says. The solution? An electronic proxy. The sponsor completed it and gave the lawyer a “directed” proxy – specifying how the proxy was to be used. Glaathaar could not vote the sponsor’s shares; he could use them only to achieve a quorum.

Electronic proxies can save you.

Three years ago, the New York state legislature shook up the world of co-ops and condos by changing the way tax abatements get parceled out. Starting in the 2012-2013 tax year, only primary residents of co-op and condo apartments were eligible. The change complicated bookkeeping for co-ops in a number of ways, and it was only in the last few months that things had settled down enough so that one managing agent could say, “The situation has more or less returned to normal.”

Guess again.

Since the New York State Legislature codified the current property tax system into four classifications in 1981 – Class 1 including one- to three-family homes; Class 2 for
co-ops, condos, and rental buildings; Class 3 for utilities; and Class 4 for commercial properties – the system, inequitable from the start, has grown into a patchwork of rates, assessments, caps, and phase-ins so complex and politically fraught that each time a proposal has been made for reform, the howls of protest have pushed it back.

There is no touching the system without creating, in relative terms at least, winners and losers.

Election season is coming. Everyone you know is preparing, taking sides, discussing the issues, and maybe reassessing who their real friends are – based on who they’re supporting. It’s never an easy task to elect a new co-op board. But what if there was a way to make it a little bit easier?

Thinking about installing a canopy at your building’s front door? Beware: long ribbons of red tape await.

In a decision that’s sure to fuel the smoking debate in every co-op in the city, a state Supreme Court judge has awarded more than $120,000 in back maintenance, interest and attorney fees to a co-op shareholder who claimed that smoke from other apartments had permeated her unit and rendered it uninhabitable.

In his decision, Justice Arthur Engoron wrote: “This Court...is only saying that if you want to avail yourself of the right to rent out residences, you assume the obligation to insure that your tenants are not forced to smell and breathe carcinogenic toxins.”

The lawsuit was filed by Susan Reinhard, who bought an apartment in the Connaught Tower co-op at 300 E. 54th Street in 2006 but never occupied the apartment because it smelled of cigarette smoke. The court ruled that the co-op is liable for all maintenance from June 2007 to the present.

“It’s ground-breaking,” says attorney Robert Braverman, a partner in Braverman Greenspun, who was not involved in the case. “What the judge is saying is that landlords, including co-op boards, are going to be responsible that smoke doesn’t pass from one unit to another. I think it’s going to create a lot of discussion within the industry.”

The New York state legislature decreed that, beginning with the 2012-2013 tax year, only primary residents of co-op and condo apartments are eligible for tax abatements. The change complicated bookkeeping for individuals, boards and property managers, especially in buildings where an assessment was levied that equaled the tax abatements. Here are three simple steps that can help your building untangle the mess of primary residency, abatements, and assessments: